4chan Trolls Tried and Failed to Start a Trend Where Women Peed Their Pants For Equality

The campaign to #pissforequality is a hoax.

Like so many of the other internet challenges before it, #pissforequality started as a joke. And like so many bad jokes, it started on 4chan.

I imagine there are innumerable threads on 4chan devoted to the topic of how to best humiliate feminists (remember the sad attempt to trick women into paying money to attend their fake conference FemCon?) but this one started with a simple, actionable idea: "What if we somehow get Tumbler tards to publicly piss/shit their pants in the name of 'equality?'" Another user asked, "How?" and the original poster came up with the idea of telling women to pee their pants "to show support for rape victims that [sic] soil themselves when they are raped unconscious." Hence, #pissforequality.

This happened on October 2. By the end of the day, there were a smattering of tweets using the hashtag—accompanied by photos of women gamely peeing their pants—and 4chan users were giving themselves a virtual pat on the back for having pulled it off.

The #pissforequality hashtag on Twitter is populated almost entirely with people talking about how stupid women are for falling for the joke, but there doesn't seem to be a single tweet from a woman who peed herself in earnest for the cause. The accounts that do exist with purported pee-pants photos are obviously fake, without followers or previous tweets (like this account and this account); of the "numerous feminists on Twitter posting images of their stained and soiled pants" listed in this article, not a single one of the accounts has existed for more than a week. It's straight-up trolling.

Of course, people want to believe that this thing exists. There's something ingrained in human nature that makes us hope other people are stupider than we are; that we can trick people into humiliating themselves online simply by wielding a new hashtag. The internet has shown us time and time again how badly we want this to happen: There was or 4chan's horrific hashtag campaign #cuttingforbieber, where the group urged teens to slit their wrists (though no one actually did). And who could forget the rumors about the Paracetamol Challenge (where teens dared each other to swallow lethal amounts of painkillers) or the Fire Challenge (where teens doused themselves in flammable liquid and lit themselves on fire)—both unabashedly fake.